Please enable iframes to view content. There are plenty of ways to use your equirectangular panoramas online. The main downside of the programs offering this functionality is the fiddly time consuming process you have to go through to publish the panoramas online, whether they have been saved as an .swf or as an html package. If you want compatibility you’d go with html and get a folder with half a dozen files that you have to upload to the website. If you want to have a blog then you would have to use ftp to upload the files and then work out a way of making it all work. I wanted a simple to use tool that would take care of the embedding of the panoramas and minimise the work involved. Here is how it goes:

Copy the code and paste it into the html/text of your website or blog.

Thats it, it does the fiddly work for you. You can embed photospheres right from the google nexus phone if you wanted and, the plugin has a “Page background” option where the panorama fills the complete screen and is floating behind any content you’ve got. (Make sure that you don’t have non-transparent elements above z-index:-1 covering the panorama if nothing shows up.) The panorama embed code looks like this:

The tool is available on the orb.photo website The script uses webgl and javascript to place the equirectangular texture over a sphere which is then animated for the immersive experience. Javascript implementation ensures the panoramas will work on the mobile devices.

I’ve seen different attempts to make the dropdown menus work intuitively on touch devices and while some are trying to utilise the double tap (not the best as this triggers zoom) and various jquery contraptions, all you need is for the top level link to ignore the first tap and let the user see the dropdown.

This can be done by placing a bit of javascript into the onclick property of the anchor tag that prevents location change and self destructs so the link becomes clickable on the second interaction:

Design software is becoming more functional and sophisticated but as far as productivity goes — us humans still have to press the buttons to make stuff happen.

Don’t get me wrong, if you are just starting out in design college it is ok to mouse through the menus to get to a function for those 20 objects you are working on. But when you are trying to get the job done as quick as possible, nothing beats the speed and satisfaction of using keyboard shortcuts and pre-defined macros.

Adobe software is generally great with keyboard shortcuts and in this example scenario I will go through using the Wacom Intuos Pro’s ExpressKeys to improve on built in shortcuts by applying custom text heading styles to an Indesign project using the physical buttons of a Wacom tablet.

You can of course apply the custom styles via the character style menu

Or you could press Ctrl+Enter and use the quick apply to look up the style by typing your custom style name

But if you have a Wacom tablet you can program the tablet’s physical buttons that will apply up to 8 commonly used styles and boost your performance. To do so, you will need to open the Wacom Tablet Properties, click on the Functions icon and pick the application you want to define the functions for.

Pick the Keystroke option for the button you are programming and type Ctrl+Enter followed by the custom style name and then enter again exactly as if you were doing a quick-apply:

That’s it, you’ve just created a physical button to save yourself over a dozen keypresses to get to the page title style. Repeat this for all the actions you will be using and enjoy the quicker and easier workflow.

So I set out to make myself familiar with the screen and make something fun in the process. I made a remake of the classic breakout game, here is a video of the gameplay:

Parts required:

Attiny85 + dip8 socket

SSD1306 OLED screen

2x push buttons

2x resistors (10kOhm optimal)

3x4cm copper clad board

Piezo speaker

3V 2032 coin cell battery

Paper clip

So first of all you want to create the PCB, to do this just design the layout (printable pcb pdf)

Print the design on a page from a glossy magazine with a laser printer and use an iron or a laminator to transfer the design to the copper. Put the PCB into ferric chloride until the copper is etched away

Clean off the toner with acetone:

Drill the holes and solder the parts. The speaker is soldered to PB1 pin on the attiny and ground. Connect the large ground pads with a bit of wire. Bend and solder the paper clip to keep the battery in place.

This is a 500 RGB pixels ceiling I made, the project was done in March 2013 and has been working non stop every day since then. The ceiling is installed in the kids department of The Golden Boot shoe shop.

Wipe off the toner with acetone, tin and drill the holes using .8mm carbide drill

Solder the parts and add battery contacts made from a paperclip

Program the attiny85 with the following code (16 15us pulses, pause for 7330us and do 16 15us pulses again)
I am ussing the assembler port calls to trigger the pins because digitalWrite() function is too slow

I’ve been looking to get to grips with EAGLE PCB layout software and this was a great project to start with.

The idea behind persistence of vision is that an array of led pixels blinks out an image line by line, so when you move it the lines get stacked up one after another. If you can do this fast enough out retinas will see an after-image of multiple lines at once and we’ll be able to make out the image.

I decided to make a 10 pixel array and as there are less than 10 pins on the Attiny I decided to use Charlieplex layout to drive all of them.

I’ve later had to cut the track to pin one and re-wire it to pin 6 as if I used the reset pin I would no longer be able to re-program the chip. Luckily we can drive up to 20 charlieplexed LEDs with 5 pins so we’ll just take care of this in the program.

I exported the board from EAGLE as a nonochrome image and laser-printed on a page from a magazine.

The printout is then pressed against a sheet of copper clad board and ironed over to make the tone stick to the copper. The board is then washed free of paper, cut and submersed in ferric chloride to etch away the areas not covered by the toner. PCB is drilled, covered with solder paste and the components are soldered on.

We then want a program that will very quickly pulse out our image bearing in mind that only one LED can be lit at any given moment. We’ll be using assembler port commands as digitalWrite would be too slow for what we are doing. To flash the program to Attiny I’ll be using arduino as isp, see high-low tech group page for more details

The PORTB sets pins high or low and the DDRB sets the active pins as outputs and inactive pins as inputs to prevent any random leds lighting up. See how we can change state of multiple pins with a single call.

I made two functions to make the control easier. 10 bits of data are passed in 2 variables and if the bit in a variable is high the corresponding led will be lit.

What the above does is the switch-on iteration which lights each led in sequence you see in the video as I put the battery in.

So our POV is working, lets write some text. It would be a pain to manually create text string from vertical lines of pixels so I wrote a php program to take care of that. Feel free to use it, it converts text into a 10 bit matrix:

Pursuing an idea to create a fully automated lightweight 360° bracket that would work with pocket cameras I came across a challenge.

The starting point for the project was a 15kg torque mg995 servo powerful enough to move the camera when powered from a small 3v battery. I was planning to use an arduino programmed Attiny85 controller to drive the servo which is where I got stuck at first.